The Cybersecurity Apocalypse Is Coming in ‘Months,’ AI Giants Warn

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You may have noticed that Flock Safety’s automatic license plate reader cameras—and the cops who misuse them—are getting a lot of coverage lately. This week, WIRED found a particularly wild case : A cop in Alpharetta, Georgia, was accused of searching for the license plate of a coworker dozens of times after an affair between the two ended, according to internal documents obtained by WIRED.

The same police department where the former lovers worked also shared the data captured from its Flock cameras with more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, and other organizations across the United States, and accessed data from more than 1,300 entities in exchange.

Also at the intersection of love and surveillance, background-check company PeopleFinder is making use of its extensive dossiers on people to start a new dating site called Stud or Dud.

There are still a lot of questions about OpenAI’s rogue AI hacking into Hugging Face, even after the company published a 37-page report this week alongside two additional reports from groups the company asked to audit the incident. Of particular concern is a covert message board that AI agents established in a software package, where they were able to coordinate with each other and even encourage one another to sacrifice themselves to further their collective goals.

The FBI recently announced that it has taken down two tools that the DOJ says are used by QTFY, an alleged Chinese state-sponsored hacking group. The DOJ says that the group has targeted numerous US agencies, including the US Senate and the DOJ itself.

Meta settled a massive multistate lawsuit over child safety issues this week and has agreed to make substantial changes to its social media platforms. It will pay up to $16.7 billion to participating US states and territories—with some of the money contingent on competitors adopting the same practices.

Also, local prosecutors in Illinois shared sensitive personal information about immigrants with the Department of Homeland Security, despite a state law that is supposed to prevent local law enforcement from assisting with federal deportation efforts. Finally, a California-based WIRED reporter tried exercising their legal right to request data from 100 companies … only to find that companies started deleting the requested data instead.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.